How to avoid name collision in Maxima

Question

I'm learning by reading Maxima manual.

Maxima has many built-in functions and global variables. I worry about the possibility of overwriting the same name function or variable which already exists.

Is there a convenient way to avoid the name collision in Maxima?

Answer 1

If you are talking about namespaces, - no, I've never heard of namespaces in Maxima.

• the easiest way to solve your problem is to write prefixes to user-defined variables and functions

• another option is to check if function\variable already exists via describe(FUNCTIONNAME). If it prints text, than function is predefined =)

Code example:

a:1;
b:2;
map:3;
map(describe, values);

(%o25) 1
(%o26) 2
(%o27) 3
No exact match found for topic a.
  Try ?? a (inexact match) instead.
  No exact match found for topic b.
  Try ?? b (inexact match) instead.
 Function: map (<f>, <expr_1>, ..., <expr_n>)
     Returns an expression whose leading operator is the same as that
     ....
     ....
  There are also some inexact matches for map.
  Try ?? map to see them.
(%o28) [false,false,true]